Apollo's Brain: A Shell Game of Biblical Proportions

Apollo's Brain: A Shell Game of Biblical Proportions

The Best Thing I've Read All Year

The Best Thing I've Read All Year Published on May 04, 2000

Sunday, April 30, 2000
By SHARON UNDERWOOD
For the Valley News (White River Junction, VT)

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda" could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

Sharon Underwood's e-mail is: . I had the chance to speak with her yesterday. Her son is doing fine now, the first in his family to graduate from college.

If you have friends who think Jesus would have been a Republican -- on the side of billionaire Pat Robertson, et al, in opposing Hate Crimes Legislation, opposing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and, yes, opposing Vermont's extension of economic benefits to same-sex couples -- please feel free to forward this column to as many of them as you like. Can't you just see it? Jesus arm-in-arm with the NRA trying to maintain the gun-show loophole? Stumping the Holy Land in favor of a massive tax cut for the rich, while opposing a hike in the minimum wage? Somehow, I think not.

Where is America headed?

Where is America headed? Not an easy question to answer these days. America is more split and confusing than during the Vietnam days, the days of hippies and "love it or leave it" rantings.

Society is those days was split over various issues but nothing like the polarization one sees now.

ancient aliens

Scientists flatly deny the possibility that aliens could have visited the earth thousands of years ago. Why such out-of-hand deniel? Is it that they really disbelieve the possibility or that they need to deny the possibility? Scientists have always denied the possibility of things until they have had their noses rubbed in it. Airplaines were impossible. Going to the moon was impossible. As often as not the explanations scientists come out with are as incredulous as what they are denying.

Why is it impossible to believe one thing and impossible not to believe another? Megolithic structures around the globe that engineers say would be difficult if not impossible to construct, even with today's technology. Yet we are to believe the ancients did it with stone tools and rolling one-hundred ton blocks of stone on logs at distances up to 60 or 80 miles, and do it in 20 years.

What ancient culture could afford to use the energy of tens of thousands of workers over decades while simul-taneously waging wars with their neighbors and maintaining all the daily activities needed to support a civil-ization? We would have a hard time justifying such an expenditure in manpower and resources today.

The explanations of disbelievers, the so-called skeptics, may sound very plausible but they don't ring true. The explanations they present come across as grasping at straws rather than admit the possibility of alien visitations in the past. Scientists are as dogmatic as anybody. Scientists will fight tooth and nail to maintain what they believe to be true and dismiss out-of-hand anything contrary to their beliefs. When all else fails they fall back on coincidence. Coincidence that similar structures we could hardly build today have appeared all over the world.

Visits by aliens in the past may or may not have happened. Scientists are supposed to have open minds. So why can't the admit they possibility and research it rather than glibly deny the possibility?

should humanity survive?

Or should it be stated, should the human species survive?

The way we treat each other I am beginning to wonder if there is such a thing as 'humanity.'

Throughout our history we have been antagonistic and belligerent toward each other. We still slaughter each other in wholesale lots. We seem to be a species of "I'm going to get mine no matter what it costs anybody else."

We have drug lords getting filthy rich selling death. We have arms merchants who will sell anything to anybody at the right price, no matter the death and destruction it causes. We have child laborers working 12 hour days for pennies. We are raping our planet of its resources and polluting our air and water.

We live in a world where apparently people can't be civil towards each other. The human species is all one race whatever the skin color or facial features. But we go around killing each other for what? Because of religious or political or economic differences?

The human species dominates the planet. And look what we have done to the planet. Perhaps we will succeed in killing ourselves off. Mother Nature sure won't miss us.

private property

How can government property be private?

Any property that the government owns was paid for with our tax dollars. So, how can government post signs saying no trespassing - private property? Would you pay for something then have somebody else declare that you can't use it, can't even walk on it?

"Of the people, by the people, for the people" seems to say to me that all government property is owned by the people, which is you and me. So how can government declare limited or no access to that property?

is it liberal?

When did liberal become a dirty word? Somehow the Righteous Right has managed to convince many people that to be a liberal is to be un-American. Frankly, I'm not sure what the word is supposed to stand for anymore. Liberal does not mean Socialist. It used to mean that people believed that they had a responsibility to help each other, that part of government's job was to level the playing field, that all Americans had a right to be regarded equally, that all Americans had a right to be treated with dignity.

Some people say that this has been carried too far. I may not disagree, entirely. Government actions are not necessarily the best route. Individuals also have a responsibility to help themselves and not simply sit back and expect government to do for them. But they must have equal chance, equal access to oportunities. People also have to do for themselves to have the qualifications to partake of that access. If one is not qualified for a position, then no government should force an agency to accept the person. Maybe we do need programs that help certain segments acquire what is needed but those programs should not be based on one person over another. Everybody deserves a chance for decent and safe shelter. Everybody deserves a chance for decent nutrition. Everybody deserves a chance to be the best he/she can be.

That is the point, "deserves a chance." Not that have it handed to one on a platter but the chance to access to opportunity. We are a stratified society. We will always be a stratified society. That is the nature of the beast. Some are born into better circumstances than others that lead to better opportunities. Even so, there are those who have risen from the bottom to the top, primarily through their own hard work.

To me "liberal" is more opportunities for more people with fewer restrictions. This country is not perfect. It needs to keep moving ahead. The Righteous Right wants to keep the status quo. A status quo from about a hundred years ago. That way lies stagnantion, the loss of vibrancy that this country has stood for for two hundred and thirty-three years. Is it un-American to want this country to keep forging ahead trying to bring about the ideals we were founded upon?